Our Land and Land Policy

by Henry George

V.
What our Land Policy should be

Original publication: 1871

HOW WE SHOULD DISPOSE OF OUR NEW LAND.

WHEN we reflect what land is; when we consider
the relations between it and labour; when we remember that to own the
land upon which a man must gain his subsistence is to all intents and
purposes to own the man himself, we cannot remain in doubt as to what
should be our policy in disposing of our public lands.
We have no right to dispose of them except
to actual settlers—to the men who really want to use them; no right to sell
them to speculators, to give them to railroad companies or to grant them
for agricultural colleges; no more right to do so than we have to sell
or to grant the labour of the people who must some day live upon them.
And to actual settlers we should give them.
Give, not sell. For we have no right to step between the man who wants
to use land and land which is as yet unused, and to demand of him a price
for our permission to avail himself of his Creator's bounty. The cost of
surveying and the cost of administering the Land Office may be proper charges;
but even these it were juster and wiser to charge as general expenses, to
be borne by the surplus wealth of the country, by the property which settlement
will make more valuable. We can better afford to bear the necessary expenses
of the Land Office than we can the expense of keeping useless men-of-war
at sea or idle troops in garrison posts. When we can give a few rich bankers
twenty or thirty millions a year we can afford to pay a few millions in
order to make our public lands perfectly free. Let the settler keep all
of his little capital; it is his seed wheat. When he has gathered his crop,
then we may take our toll, with usury if need be. And we should give but
in limited quantities.
For while every man has a right to as much
land as he can properly use, no man has a right to any more, and when others
do or will want it, cannot take any more without infringing on their rights.
One hundred and sixty acres is too much to give one person; it is more
than he can cultivate; and our great object should be to give everyone
an opportunity of employing his own labour, and to give no opportunity
to anyone to appropriate the labour of others. We cannot afford to give
so much in view of the extent of the public domain and the demand for homes
yet to be made upon it. While we are calling upon all the world to come
in and take our land, let us save a little for our own children. Nor can
we afford to give so much in view of the economic loss consequent upon the
dispersion of population. Four families to the square mile are not enough
to secure the greatest return to labour and the least waste in exchanges.
Eighty acres is quite enough for anyone, and I am inclined to think forty
acres still nearer the proper amount.

There should be
but this one way of disposing of the agricultural lands. None at all should
be given to the States, except such as was actually needed for sites of
public buildings; none at all for school funds or agricultural colleges.
The earnings of a self-employing, independent people, upon which the State
may at any time draw, constitute the best school fund; to diffuse wealth
so that the masses may enjoy the luxury of learning is the best way to provide
for colleges.

SOME OBJECTIONS.

IT will be said: If the public land is to
be morselled out in this way, what is to be done for stock ranches and
sheep farms? There will be the unused land, the public commons. Let the
large herds and flocks keep upon that, moving farther along as it is needed
for settlement. But there would be plenty of stock kept on eighty-acre or
even forty-acre farms. In Belgium each six-acre farmer has his cow or two
of the best breed, and kept in the best condition.

And it may be said:
There is some land, which requires extensive work for its reclamation.
Capital cannot be induced to undertake this work if the land be given away
in small pieces. But if capital cannot, labour can. The most difficult
reclamation in the world—that of turning the shifting sands of the French
sea-coast into gardens has been done by ten- and twelve-acre farmers. Observe
that it is proposed to give the lands only to actual settlers. Is there
any of our land which requires for its reclamation greater capital than
that involved in the labour of sixteen men to the square mile, working to
make themselves homes? The cost of reclaiming the swamp lands of California,
which has been made an excuse for giving them away by the hundred thousand
acres, does not in most cases equal the cost of the fencing required on
the uplands. Let men be sure that they are working for themselves, give them
a little stake in the general prosperity, and labour will combine intelligently
and economically, enough.

HOW SETTLEMENT WOULD GO ON.

UNDER such a policy as this, settlement
would go on regularly and thoroughly. Population would not in the same time
spread over as much ground as under the present policy; but what it did spread
over would be well settled and well cultivated. There would be no necessity
for building costly railroads to connect settlers with a market. The market
would accompany settlement. Noone would go out into the wilderness, to brave
all the hardships and discomforts of the solitary frontier life; but with
the foremost line of settlement would go church and schoolhouse and lecture-room.
The ill-paid, overworked mechanic of the city could find a home on the
soil, where he would not have to abandon all the comforts of civilisation,
but where there would be society enough to make I life attractive, and where
the wants of his neighbours would give a market for his surplus labour until
his land began to produce; and to tell those who complain of want of employment
and low wages to make for themselves homes on the public domain would then
be no idle taunt.

Consider, too,
the general gain from this mode of settlement. How much of our labour is
now given to transportation, and wasted in various ways, because of the scattering
of our population, which land grabbing has caused?

SOMETHING STILL MORE RADICAL NEEDED.

BUT still the adoption of such a policy
would affect only the land that is left us. It would be preventive, not remedial.
It would still leave the great belts granted to railroads, the vast estates
such as those with which California is cursed, and the large bodies of
land which everywhere have been made the subject of speculation. It would
leave, moreover, still in full force, the tendency, which is concentrating
the ownership of the land in a few hands in the older settled States. And
further than this, I hardly think, agitate as we may, that we can secure
the adoption of such a preventive policy until we can do something to make
the monopolisation of land unprofitable. What we want, therefore, is something,
which shall destroy the tendency to the aggregation of land, which shall
break up present monopolisation, and which shall prevent (by doing away with
the temptation) future monopolisation. And as arbitrary and restrictive laws
are always difficult to enforce, we want a measure which shall be equal,
uniform and constant in its operation; a measure which will not restrict
enterprise, which will not curtail production, and which will not offend
the natural sense of justice.

When our 40,000,000
of people have to raise $800,000,000 per year for public purposes
we cannot have any difficulty in discovering such a remedy, in the adjustment
of taxation.

A LESSON FROM THE PAST.

LET us turn for a moment from the glare
of the Nineteenth Century to the darkness of medieval times. The spirit of
the Feudal System dealt far more wisely with the land than the system which
has succeeded it, and rude outcome of a barbarous age though it was, we may,
remembering the difference of times and conditions, go back to it for many
valuable lessons. The Feudal System annexed duties to privileges. In theory,
at least, protection was the corollary of allegiance, and honour brought
with it the obligation to a good life and noble deeds, while the ownership
of land involved the necessity of bearing the public expenses. One portion
of the land, allotted to the Crown, defrayed the expenses of the State; out
of the profits of another portion, allotted to the military tenants, the
army was provided and maintained; the profits of a third portion, given to
religious uses, supported the Church and relieved the sick, the indigent
and the wayworn, while there was a fourth portion, the commons, of which
no man was master, but which was free to all the people. The great debt,
the grinding taxation, which now falls on the labouring classes of England,
are but the results of a departure from this system. Before Henry VIII suppressed
the monasteries and enclosed the commons there were no poor laws in England
and no need for any; until the Crown lands were got rid of there was no necessity
for taxation for the support of the Government; until the military tenants
shirked the condition on which they had been originally permitted to reap
the profits of landownership, England could at any time put an army in the
field without borrowing and without taxation; and a recent English writer
has estimated that had the feudal tenures been continued, England would have
now had at her command a completely appointed army of six hundred thousand
men, without the cost of a penny to the public treasury or to the labouring
classes. Had this system been continued the vast war expenses of England
would have come from the surplus wealth of those who make war; the expenses
of government would have borne upon the classes who direct the Government;
and the deep gangrene of pauperism, which perplexes the statesman and baffles
the philanthropist, would have had no existence. England would have been
stronger, richer, happier. Why should we not go back to the old system, and
charge the expenses of government upon our lands?

If we do, we shall
go far towards breaking up land monopoly and all its evils, and towards
counteracting the causes now so rapidly concentrating wealth in a few hands.
We shall raise our revenues by the most just and the most simple means,
and with the least possible burden upon production.

TAXATION OF LAND FALLS ONLY ON ITS OWNER.

THERE is one peculiarity in a land tax.
With a few trifling exceptions of no practical importance it is the only
tax, which must be paid by the holder of the thing taxed. If we impose a
tax upon money loaned, the lender will charge it to the borrower, and the
borrower must pay it, otherwise the money will be sent out of the country
for investment, and if the borrower uses it in his business he, in his turn,
must charge it to his customers or his business becomes unprofitable. If
we impose a tax upon buildings, those who use them must pay it, as otherwise
the erection of buildings becomes unprofitable, and will cease until rents
become high enough to pay the regular profit on the cost of building and
the tax besides. But not so with land. Land is not an article of production.
Its quantity is fixed. No matter how little you tax it there will be no more
of it; no matter how much you tax it there will be no less. It can neither
be removed nor made scarce by cessation of production. There is no possible
way in which owners of land can shift the tax upon the user. And so while
the effect of taxation upon all other things is to increase their value,
and thus to make the consumer pay the tax—the effect of a tax upon land is
to reduce its value—that is, its selling price, as it reduces the profit
of its ownership without reducing its supply. It will not, however, reduce
its renting price. The same amount of rent will be paid; but a portion of
it will now go to the State instead of to the landlord. And were we to impose
upon land a tax equal to the whole annual profit of its ownership, land would
be worth nothing and might in many cases be abandoned by its owners. But
the users would still have to pay as much as before—paying in taxes what
they formerly paid as rent. And reversely, if we were to reduce or take off
the taxes on land, the owner, not the user, would get the benefit. Rents
would be no higher, but would leave more profit, and the value of land would
be more.

LAND TAXATION THE BEST TAXATION.

THE best tax is that which comes nearest to filling the three following
conditions:

That it bear as
lightly as possible upon production.
That it can be easily and cheaply collected,
and cost the people as little as possible in addition to what it yields
the Government.
That it bear equally—that is, according to
the ability to pay.
The tax upon land better fulfils these conditions
than any tax it is possible to impose.
1.—As we have seen, it does not bear at all
upon production—it adds nothing to prices, and does not affect the cost
of living.
2—As it does not add to prices, it costs the
people nothing in addition to what it yields the Government; while as land
cannot be hid and cannot be moved, it can be collected with more ease and
certainty, and with less expense than any other tax.
3.—A tax upon the value of land is the most
equal of all taxes, not that it is paid by all in equal amounts, or even
in equal amounts upon equal means, but because the value of land is something
which belongs to all, and in taxing land values we are merely taking for
the use of the community something which belongs to the community, which
by the necessities of our social organisation we are obliged to permit
individuals to hold. Of course, in speaking of the value of land, I mean
the value of the land itself, not the value of any improvement which has
been made upon it—I mean what I believe is sometimes called in England the
unearned value of land.
From its very nature it must be apparent that
property in land differs essentially from other property, and if the principles
I have endeavoured to state in the third section of this paper are correct,
it must be evident that it is not unjust to impose taxes upon land values,
which are not imposed on other property. But as the proposition may be
somewhat startling, it may be worthwhile to dwell a little on this point.

OF THE JUSTICE OF TAXING LAND.

HERE is a lot in the central part of San
Francisco, which, irrespective of the building upon it, is worth $100,000.
What gives that value? Not what its owner has done but the fact
that 150,000 people have settled around it. This lot yields its owner
$10,000 annually. Where does this $10,000 come from? Evidently from the
earnings of the workers of the community, for it can come from no where
else. Here is a lot on the outskirts. It is in the same condition in which
nature left it. Intrinsically it is worth no more than when there were but
a hundred people at Yerba Buena Cove. Then it was worth nothing. Now that
there are 150,000 people here and more coming, it is worth $3000. That is,
its owner can command $3000 worth of the labour or of the wealth of the community.
What does he give for this? Nothing; the land was there before he was. Suppose
a community like that of San Francisco, in which land, though in individual
hands as now, has no value. Suppose, then, that all at once the land was
given a value of, say, $150,000,000, which is about the present value of
land in San Francisco. What would be the effect? That a tax, of which $150,000,000
is the capitalised value, would be levied upon the whole community for the
benefit of a portion. There would be no more in the community than before,
and no greater means of producing wealth. But of that wealth, beyond the
share, which they formerly had, the landowners would now command $150,000,000.
That is, there would be $150,000,000 less for other people who were not landholders.
And does not this consideration of the nature and effect of land values go
far to explain the puzzling fact that not withstanding all the economies
in production and distribution which a dense population admits, just as a
community increases in population and wealth, so does the reward of the labourer
decrease and poverty deepen? One hundred men settle in a new place. Land
has at first little or no value. The net result of their labour is divided
pretty equally between them. Each one gets pretty nearly the full value of
his contribution to the general stock. The community becomes 100,000. Land
has become valuable, its value perhaps aggregating as much as the value of
all other property. The production of the community may now be more per capita
for each individual who works, but before the division is made, one half
of the product must go to the landholders. How then can the labourer get
so much as he could in the small community?

Now in this view
of the matter—considering land values as an indication of the appropriation
(though doubtless the necessary appropriation) of the wealth of all; considering
land rentals as a tax upon the labour of the community, is not a tax upon
land values the most just and the most equal tax that can be levied? Should
we not take that which rightfully belongs to' the whole before we take
that which rightfully belongs to the individual? Should we not tax this
tax upon labour before we tax productive labour itself?

That the value
of our land, even the "necessary value" which it would have when stripped
of speculative value, would easily bear the whole burden of taxation, there
can be no doubt. The statistics are too confused and too unreliable to enable
us to judge accurately of the value of land as compared with the value
of other property; but we have high authority for the belief that the value
of our land is equal to the value of all other property, including the
improvements upon it. The New York Commissioners for the Revision of the
Revenue Laws?—David A. Wells, Edwin Dodge and George W. Cuyler, the first
named of whom, as United States Special Commissioner of the Revenue, has
had better opportunities for studying all matters connected with taxation
than any other man in the United States?—say in their report, rendered
this year: "A careful consideration and study of the nature and classification
of property inclines the Commissioners to indorse the correctness of an
opinion which appears to have been originally proposed by a financial
writer of New York [George Opdyke] as far back as 1851, viz.: 'That universally
the market value of the aggregate of land and that of the aggregate of
productive capital are equal.'"

And it may be here
remarked that these New York Commissioners in their elaborate report recommend
the total abolition of the tax on personal property on the ground (which
has been proved in every State in the Union, and, in fact, by every nation
of ancient or modern times) that it is utterly impossible to collect it
with any degree of fulness and anything like fairness, and that the attempt
to do so results in injury both to the material and the moral interests
of the community. They propose instead of the tax on personal property,
to tax every individual on an amount three times as great as the annual
rental of the house or place of business he occupies, and present a strong
array of reasons to show that this would be a much more equitable and productive
mode of taxation. Better still, for the reasons I have given, to abandon
the attempt to tax personal property or anything in lieu of it, and to
put the bulk of taxation entirely on land values. Nevertheless, after all
that can be said, it must be confessed that there would be some slight
injustice in doing so. I had ten thousand dollars, let us say, which I
might have put out at high interest, or invested in my business. Supposing
the existing policy would be continued, I bought land with it, calculating
that in a few years, when population became greater, people would be glad
to buy it of me for a much higher price, or give me one fourth of the crop
for the privilege of cultivating it. You now impose taxation, which will
lower the value of my land. If you do this, you make my speculation less
profitable than others I might have gone into, and thus do me injustice,
for you gave me no notice. This is true, and it is this consideration which
makes men like John Stuart Mill shrink from the practical application of
deductions from their own doctrines, and propose that in resuming their ownership
of the land of England, the people of England shall pay its present proprietors
not only its actual value, but also the present value its prospective increase
in value. But if we once do a public wrong, we can never right it without
doing somebody injustice. England sought to right the wrong of slavery without
injustice to the slaveholders who had invested their capital in human flesh
and blood. She succeeded by making them pecuniary compensation; but in doing
this she did a worse injustice to her own white slaves on whom the burden
of the payment has been imposed. And by shrinking from doing this slight
injustice which would affect but very few people in the community, and those
most able to stand it, we continue a ten thousand fold greater injustice;
and the longer we delay action, the greater will be the injustice which we
must do.

OF SOME EXEMPTIONS, AND SOME ADDITIONS.

FOR the purpose
of making it still more sure that taxation should not bear heavily upon
anyone; for the purpose of still further counteracting the tendency to
the concentration of wealth, and for the purpose of securing as far as
possible to every citizen an interest in the soil, there should be a uniform
exemption to a small amount made to each landholder—perhaps a smaller amount
in the cities, where land is only used for residences and business purposes,
than in the country, where labour is directly applied to the land. Those
whose land did not exceed in value this minimum would have no taxes to
pay; those whose land did, would pay upon the surplus. This would reverse
the present effect of our revenue system, and tend to make the holding
of land in large bodies less profitable than the holding of it in small
bodies.

And while, perhaps,
it might not be wise to attempt to limit the accumulations of any individual
during his lifetime, or at any rate it is not yet necessary to try the
experiment, there should be a very heavy duty, amounting to a considerable
part of the whole, levied upon the estates of deceased persons, and in
the case of intestates the whole should escheat to the State where there
were no heirs of the first or second degree.

There is still
another source from which a large revenue might be harmlessly drawn—license
taxes upon such businesses as it is public policy to restrict and discourage,
such as liquor selling, the keeping of gambling houses (where this cannot
be prevented), etc. All other taxes of whatever kind or nature, whether National
State County, or Municipal, might then be swept away.

THE EFFECTS OF SUCH A CHANGE.

CONSIDER the effects of the adoption of such a system:

The mere holder
of land would be called on to pay just as much taxes as the user of land.
The owner of a vacant city lot would have to pay as much for the privilege
of keeping other people off it till he wanted to use it as his neighbour
who has a fine house upon his lot, and is either using or deriving rent
from it. The monopoliser of agricultural land would be taxed as much as
though his land were covered with improvements, with crops and with stock.

Land prices would
fall; land speculation would receive its death-blow; land monopolisation
would no longer pay. Millions and millions of acres from which settlers
are now shut out would be abandoned by their present owners or sold to settlers
on nominal terms. It is only in rare eases that it would pay anyone to
get land before he wanted to use it, so that those who really wanted to
use land would find it easy to get.
The whole weight of taxation would be lifted
from productive industry. The million dollar manufactory, and the needle
of the seamstress, the mechanic's cottage, and the grand hotel, the farmer's
plough, and the ocean steamship, would be alike untaxed. All would be free
to buy or sell, to make or save, unannoyed by the tax-gatherer.
Imagine this country with all taxes removed
from production and exchange! How demand would spring up; how trade would
increase; what a powerful stimulus would be applied to every branch of
industry; what an enormous development of wealth would take place. Imagine
this country free of taxation, with its unused land free to those who would
use it! Would there be many industrious men walking our streets, or tramping
over our roads in the vain search for employment? Would we hear much of
stagnation in business, and of "over production" of the things that millions
of us want? Consider the enormous gain which would result from leaving
capital and labour, untrammelled by tax or restriction, to seek the most
remunerative fields; the enormous saving which would result from the settling
of people near each other, as they would settle, if anyone could get enough
unused land for his needs, and it would pay nobody to get any more. Consider
the effects of this policy on the distribution of wealth-directly, by reversing
the effect of taxation, which is now to make the poor poorer, and the
rich richer; indirectly, by freeing and cheapening land, and thus put
j ting labour in a position to make better terms with capital. And consider
how equalisation in the distribution of wealth would react on production-how
it would lessen the great army of involuntary idlers; how it would increase
the vigour and industry and skill of workers; for poorly rewarded labour
is poor labour all the world over, and the greater its reward, the greater
the efficiency of labour. Consider, too, the moral effects: Sharp alternations
of wealth and poverty breed vice and crime, as surely as they breed misery.
Personal independence is the foundation of all the virtues. Deep poverty
brutalises men. Where it exists, the preacher will preach in vain; and
the philanthropist will toil in vain; they are dumping their good words
and good deeds into such a Slough of Despond as Pilgrim saw.

GAIN AND WHO WOULD LOSE.

THAT the policy proposed would be to the
advantage of all who do not hold land is clear enough. But it must not
be imagined that all who hold land would lose. On the contrary, the large
majority of landholders would be gainers. Whether a landholder would gain
or lose, would depend upon whether his interest as a landholder, which
would be adversely affected, was greater or less than his other interests,
which would be beneficially affected. The man who owns a house and lot
of equal value would have less taxes to pay if taxation were taken off
of buildings and put on land, as the aggregate value of land is greater
than that of buildings. His homestead would sell for less than before, but
the money it sold for would buy just as good a house and lot as before;
so that, if his intention is to always keep a homestead, he would not lose
anything by the shrinkage in its value; or even if it was not, he would
not have to keep it long before his gain on taxes would make up for the loss
in value. While, if he was a mechanic, engaged in or connected with any of
the building trades, he would gain in more constant work and better wages
by the stimulus which the exemption of improvements from taxation, and the
reduction in the value of land would give to building. Or If he kept a store,
or was engaged in any business or profession, he would gain by the quickened
growth and increased activity of the community.

And if taxes were
removed from everything but land (with the exceptions and exemptions I
have before indicated) the gain would be largely greater. Let the farmer,
the mechanic, the manufacturer, or the business man, who is also a landowner,
calculate how much he pays of the taxes which enter into the cost of everything
he buys, or in any way uses and how much he loses by the restrictive effect
which those taxes have upon all industry and business. Then let him set
against this amount, which he now pays and loses, the additional amount
which he would pay as taxes on land, or which he would lose by the reduction
of its value, were all taxes placed upon land. Did they make this calculation,
three out of every four of those who own land would see they would be gainers.
For as yet the class whose other interests are subordinate to their interest
in the high value of land is really small. And it must be remembered that
were our whole revenue raised by a direct land tax, the amount taken from
the people in order to give the same amount to the Government would be very
much smaller than now, and that there would be a positive increase in wealth,
a large share of which would go to the landowners who would have additional
taxes to pay.

WHAT CAN BE DONE AT ONCE.

THE more the matter is considered, the more,
I think, it will appear that all our taxation, or at least the largest
part of it, should be placed upon land values. By doing so we would substitute
the best possible revenue system for our present cumbrous, unjust, wasteful
and oppressive modes of taxation; we would, without resort to special
and arbitrary laws, prevent and break up land monopolisation, and we would,
at the same time, and in the same simple, just way, do a great deal to
counteract the alarming tendency to the concentration of wealth in a few
hands, which is now so apparent.

Nevertheless, the
application of this remedy is not yet practicable. We are so used to look
upon land as upon other property, so accustomed to consider its enhancement
in value as a public gain, that it will take some time to educate public
opinion up to the proper point to permit this; and even then there will
be constitutional difficulties to be removed.

But in the meantime,
we can do something to check the progress of land monopolisation, and
even to break it up. So far as the General Government is concerned, we
can insist that no more land grants be made on any pretext or for any
purpose; but that all of the public domain still left to us shall be reserved
for the small farms of actual settlers. We can go further, and demand that
something be done to open to settlers the great belts, which have been
already handed over to railroad corporations. These grants, in the first
place, outraged natural justice, and Congress had no more right to make
them than Catherine of Russia had to give away her subjects to her paramours
and courtiers, or than the Pope had to divide the Southern Hemisphere between
the Spanish and the Portuguese. We should be perfectly justified in taking
this land back, throwing it open to settlers upon Government terms, and
paying the companies the Government price. Such an operation would largely
increase our debt, but the money would be well expended. If this cannot be
done, the land can at least be immediately surveyed, so that settlers can
find the Government sections, and the right of the Companies to land reserved
for them be declared subject to State taxation.

In this monopoly-cursed
State of ours, we may at once do a great deal to free our land. By restricting
possessory rights to the maximum amount allowed by the General Government
to pre-emptors, and by demanding payment for the large tracts now held
by speculators under five-dollar certificates, or the payment of twenty
per cent. of the purchase money, the Legislature could, in the first week
of its session, throw open to settlers some millions of acres now monopolised.
And millions of acres more would be forced into market if its holders were
only compelled to pay upon their land the same rate of taxation levied
upon other property. The Board of Equalisation created by the last Legislature
is endeavouring to secure the proper assessment of these large tracts;
but the law under which it works is defective, and the Constitutional requirement
of the election of County Assessors is very much in the way of a thorough
reform, perhaps makes it impossible. But as under our Constitution, as
interpreted by the Supreme Court, all property must be taxed equally, we
can do no more than this to break up large estates until the Constitution
is amended.

THE NECESSITY OF A RADICAL REMEDY.

THERE are many who will think that if we
do these things, or even if we merely do something to check the grosser
abuses in the disposition of our new land, we shall have done all that
is necessary. I wish to call the attention of those who thus think to a
certain class of facts:

There is a problem
which must present itself to every mind which dwells upon the industrial
history of the present century; a problem into which all our great social,
industrial, and even political questions run—which already perplexes us
in the United States; which presses with still greater force in the older
countries of Europe; which, in fact, menaces the whole civilised world,
and seems like a very riddle of the Sphinx, which fate demands of modern
civilisation, and which not to answer is to be destroyed—the problem of
the proper distribution of wealth.

How is it that
the increase of productive power and the accumulation of wealth seem to bring
no benefit, no relief to the working classes; that the condition of the
labourer is better in the new and poor country than in the old and rich
country; that in a country like Great Britain, whose productive power has
been so enormously increased, whose surplus wealth is lent to all the world,
and whose surplus productions are sent to every market, pauperism is increasing
in England, while one third of the families of Scotland live in a single
room each, and one third more in two rooms each? How is it, though
within the century steam machinery has added to the productive force of
Great Britain a power greater than that of the manual labour of the whole
human race, that the toil of mere infants is cruelly extorted—that cultivation
in the richest districts is largely carried on by gangs of women and children,
in which mere babies are worked under the lash; that little girls are to
be found wielding sledge hammers, and little boys toiling night and day
in the fearful heat of glass furnaces, or working to the extreme limit of
human endurance in fetid garrets and damp cellars, at the most monotonous
employments—children who work so early and work so hard that they know
nothing of God, have never heard of the Bible, call a violet a pretty bird,
and when shown a cow in a picture, think it must be a lion; children
whose natural protectors have been changed by brutalising poverty and the
want that knows no law, into the most cruel of taskmasters?
Why is it that in the older parts of the United
States we are rapidly approximating to the same state of things? Why is
it that, with all our labour-saving machinery, all the new methods of increasing
production which our fertile genius is constantly discovering—with all
our railroads, and steamships, and power looms, and sewing machines, our
mechanics cannot secure a reduction of two hours in their daily toil; that
the general condition of the working classes is becoming worse instead
of better; and the employment of women and children at hard labour is extending;
that though wealth is accumulating, and luxury increasing, it is becoming
harder and harder for the poor man to live?
A very Sodom's apple seems this "progress"
of ours to the classes that have the most need to progress. We have been
"developing the country" fast enough. We have been building railroads, and
peopling the wilderness, and extending our cities. But what is the gain?
We count up more millions of people, and more hundreds of millions of taxable
property; our great cities are larger, our millionaires are more numerous,
and their wealth is more enormous; but are the masses of the people any
better off? Is it not so notoriously true that we accept the statement without
question, that just as population increases and wealth augments—just in proportion
as we near the goal for which we strive so hard, poverty extends and deepens,
and it becomes harder and harder for a poor man to make a living?
That the startling change for the worse that
has come over the condition of the masses of the United States in the last
ten years is attributable in some part to the destruction caused by the
war, and in much greater part to stupid, reckless, wicked legislation, there
can be no doubt. The whole economic policy of the General Government—the management
of the debt and, of the currency, the imposition of a tariff which is oppressing
all our industry, and actually killing many branches of it, the immense
donations to corporations—has tended with irresistible force, as though
devised for the purpose, to make a few the richer and the many the poorer;
to swell the gains of a few rich capitalists, and make hundreds of thousands
of willing workmen stand with idle hands.
But beneath and beyond these special causes,
we may see, as could be seen before the war had given the money power an
opportunity and excuse for wresting the machinery of Government to its own
selfish ends, the working of some general tendency, observable all over
the world, and most obvious in the countries which have made the greatest
advances in productive power and in wealth.
What is the cause or the causes of this tendency?
If we say, as many of the economists say, that it is overpopulation in
England-that the working classes get married too early and have too many
children-what is it in the United States? If we say that in the United
States it is solely due to special conditions, what is it in Australia
and other countries of widely differing circumstances?
Now, although there are undoubtedly other
general causes, such as the tendency of modern processes to require greater
capital and rarer administrative ability, to offer greater facilities
for combination, and give more and more advantage to him who can work
on a large scale; yet if the principles previously stated are correct,
are we not led irresistibly to the conclusion that the main cause of this
general tendency to the unequal division of wealth lies in the pursuance
of a wrong policy in regard to land—in permitting a few to take and to
keep that which belongs to all; in treating the power of appropriating labour
as though it were in itself labour-produced wealth? Is not this mistake
sufficient of itself to explain most of the perplexing phenomena to which
I have alluded?
When land becomes fully monopolised as it
is in England and Ireland—when the competition between landusers becomes
greater than the competition between landowners, whatever increase of
wealth there is must go to the landowner or to the capitalist; the labourer
gets nothing but a subsistence. Amid lowing herds he never tastes meat;
raising bounteous crops of the finest wheat, he lives on rye or potatoes;
and where steam has multiplied by hundreds and by thousands manufacturing
power, he is to clad in rags, and sends his children to work while they
are yet infants. No matter what be the increase in the fertility of the
soil, no matter what the increase in product, which beneficent inventions
cause, no matter even if good laws succeed bad laws, as when free trade
succeeds protection, as has been the case in Great Britain, all the advantage
goes to the landowner; none to the landless labourer, for the ownership
of the land gives the power of taking all that labour upon it will produce,
except enough to keep the labourer in condition to work, and anything more
that is given is charity. And so increase in productive power is greater
wealth to the landowner—more splendour in his drawing rooms, more horses
in his stables and hounds in his kennels, finer yachts, and pictures and
books-more command of everything that makes life desirable; but to the labourer
it is not an additional crust.

And where land
monopolisation has not gone so far, steadily with the increase of wealth
goes on the increase of land values. Every successive increase represents
so much, which those who do not produce may take from the results of production,
measures a new tax upon the whole community for the benefit of a portion.
Every successive increase indicates no addition to wealth, but a greater
difference in the division of wealth, making one class the richer, the other
the poorer, and tending still further to increase the inequality in the distribution
of wealth—on the one side, by making the aggregations of capital larger and
its power thus greater, and on the other, by increasing the number of those
who cannot buy land for themselves, but must labour for or pay rent to others,
and while thus swelling the number of those who must make terms with capital
for permission to work, at the same time reducing their ability to make fair
terms in the bargain.

Need we go any
further to find the root of the difficulty? to discover the point at which
we must commence the reform which will make other reforms possible? And while,
on the one hand, the recognition of the main cause of the inequality in the
distribution of wealth, which is becoming a disease of our civilisation,
condemns the wild dreams of impracticable socialisms, and the impossible
theories of governmental interference to restrict accumulation and competition
and to limit the productive power of capital, by discovering a just and an
easy remedy; on the other hand, the spread of such theories should admonish
those who consider the remedy of a common-sense policy in regard to land
as too radical, of the necessity of making some attempt at reform. This great
problem of the more equal distribution of wealth must in some way be solved,
if our civilisation, like those that went before it is not to breed seeds
of its own destruction. In one way or another the attempt must be made—if
not in one way, then in another. The spread of education, the growth of democratic
sentiment, the weakening of the influences which lead men to accept the existing
condition of things as divinely appointed, insure that, and the general uneasiness
of labour, the growth of trade-unionism, the spread of such societies as
the International prove it! The terrible struggle of the Paris commune was
but such an attempt. And in the light of burning Paris we may see how
it may be that this very civilisation of ours, this second Tower of Babel,
which some deem reaches so far towards heaven that we can plainly see there
is no God may yet crumble and perish. How prophetic, in view of those recent
events, seem the words of Macaulay, when, alluding to Gibbon's argument
that modern civilisation could not be overturned as was the ancient, he
declared that in the very heart of our great cities, in the shadow of palaces,
libraries and colleges, poverty and ignorance might produce a race of Huns
fiercer than any who followed Attila, and of Vandals more destructive than
those led by Genseric.

THE PAST AND THE FUTURE OF THE NATION.

FIVE years must yet pass before we can celebrate
the hundredth anniversary of the Republic. A century ago, as the result
of nearly two hundred years of colonisation, the scarce three million people
of the thirteen colonies but fringed the Atlantic seaboard with their
settlements. Pittsburg was to them the Far West, and the Mississippi as
little known as is now the great river that through a thousand miles of
Arctic solitudes rolls sluggishly to its mouth in our newly acquired Northern
possessions.

Looking back over
the history of the great nations from whom we derive our blood, our language
and our institutions, and a hundred years seems but a small span. A hundred
years after the foundation of the city, and Rome had scarce begun her
conquering mission; a hundred years after the Norman Invasion, and the
England of the first Plantagenet differed but little from the England of
the Bastard.

How wondrous seems
our growth when compared with the past! So wondrous, so unprecedented,
that when the slow lapse of years shall have shortened the perspective,
and when, in obedience to altered conditions, the rate of increase shall
have slackened, it will seem as though in our time the very soil of America
must have bred men.

We have subdued
a continent in a shorter time than many a palace and cathedral of the
Old World was a-building; in less than a century we have sprung to a first
rank among the nations; our population is increasing in a steady ratio;
and we are carrying westward the centre of power and wealth, of luxury,
learning and refinement, with more rapidity than it ever moved before.

We look with wonder
upon the past. When we turn to the future imagination fails, for sober
reason with her cold deductions goes far beyond the highest flights that
fancy can dare, and we turn dazzled and almost awestruck from the picture
that is mirrored. Judging from the past, in all human probability there
will be on this continent a century from now, four or five, perhaps five
or six, hundred million English-speaking people, stretch from the isothermal
line which marks the northern limit of the culture of wheat, to the southern
limit of the semi-tropical clime—four or five hundred million people, with
the railroad, the telegraph, and all the arts and appliances that we now
have, and with all the undreamed-of inventions which another century such
as the past will develop. Beside the great cities of such a people, the
Paris of to-day will be a village, the London a provincial town, and to
the political power which will grow up, if these people remain under one
government, to great nations of Europe will occupy such relative positions
as the South American States now hold to the great Republic of the North.

Yet we should never
forget that we have no exemption from the difficulties and dangers which
have beset their peoples, though they may come to us in somewhat different
guise. The very rapidity of our growth should admonish us that though we
are still in our youth, our conditions are fast changing; the very possibilities
of our future warn us that this is the appointed theatre upon which the
questions that perplex the world must be worked out, or fought out. What
good, or what evil, we of this generation do, will appear in the next on
an enormously magnified scale. The blunders that we are carelessly making,
saying "these things will right themselves in time," will indeed right themselves;
but how? How was the wrong of slavery righted in the United States? The whole
history of mankind, with its story of fire and sword, of suffering and destruction,
is but one continued example of how national blunders and crimes work themselves
out. On the smaller scale of individual life and actions, the workings
of Divine justice are sometimes never seen; but sure, though not always
swift, is the Nemesis that with tireless feet follows every wrong-doing
of a people.

The American people
have had a better chance and a fairer field than any nation that has gone
before. Coming to a new world with all the experiences of the old; possessed
of all the knowledge and the arts of the most advanced of the families
of men, the temperate zone of an immense continent lay before them, where,
unembarrassed by previous mistakes, they might work out the problem of
human happiness by the light of the history of two thousand years. Yet nobly
and well as our fathers reared the edifice of civil and religious liberty,
true ideas as to the treatment of land, the very foundation of all other
institutions, seem never to have entered their minds. In a new country
where nothing was so abundant as land, and where there was nothing to suggest
its monopolisation, the men who gave direction to our thought and shaped
our polity shook off the idea of the divine right of kings without shaking
off that of the divine right of landowners. They promulgated the grand
truth that all men are born with equal rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, without promulgating the doctrines in respect to
land which alone could maintain those rights as a living reality; they instituted
a form of government based on the theory of the independence and virtue
of the masses of the people without imposing those restrictions upon land
monopolisation which alone can keep the masses virtuous and independent.
They laid the foundations for a glorious house; but they laid them in the
sand.

Already we can
see that the rains will come, the winds will blow. We see it in the increase
of the renting system in agriculture; in the massing of men in the employ
of great manufacturers; in the necessity under which thousands of our citizens
lie of voting, and even of speaking on political matters, as their employers
dictate; in the marked differentiation of our people in older sections
into the rich and the poor; in the evolution of "dangerous classes" in
our large cities; in the growth of enormous individual fortunes; in the
springing up of corporations which dwarf the States, and fairly grapple
the General Government; in the increase of political corruption; in the
ease with which a few great rings wrest the whole power of the nation to
their aggrandisement.

Go to New York,
the greatest of our American cities, the type of what many of them must
soon be, the best example of the condition to which the whole country is
tending—New York, where men build marble stables for their horses, and
an army of women crowd the streets at night to sell their souls for the
necessities which unremitting toil, such as no human being ought to endure,
will not give them—where a hundred thousand men who ought to be at work are
looking for employment, and a hundred thousand children who ought to be at
school are at work. Notice the great blocks of warehouses, the gorgeousness
of Broadway, the costly palaces which line the avenues. Notice, too, the
miles of brothels which flank them, the tenement houses, where poverty festers
and vice breeds, and the man from the free open West turns sick at heart;
notice in the depth of winter the barefooted, ragged children in the press
of the liveried equipages, and you will understand how it is that republican
government has broken down in New York; how it is that republican government
is impossible there; and how it is that the crucial test of our institutions
is yet to come. If you say that New York is a great seaport, with different
conditions from the rest of the country, go to the manufacturing towns, to
the other cities, and see the same characteristics developing just in proportion
to their population and wealth. And while we may see all this, we are doing
our utmost to make land dear, giving away the public domain in tracts of
millions of acres, drawing great belts across it upon which the settler cannot
enter; offering a premium by our taxation for the concentration of landownership,
and pressing with the whole weight of our revenue system in favour of the
concentration of wealth.

HOW A GREAT PEOPLE PERISHED.

IN all the history of the past there is
but one nation with which the great nation now growing up on this continent
can be compared; but one people which has occupied the position and exerted
the influence which, for good or evil, the American people must occupy and
exert—a nation which has left a deeper impress upon the life of the race
than any other nation that ever existed; whose sway was co-extensive with
the known world; whose heroes and poets, and sages and orators, are still
familiar names to us; whose literature and art still furnish us models; whose
language has enriched every modern tongue, and though long dead, is still
the language of science and of religion, and whose jurisprudence is the great
mine from which our modern systems are wrought. That a nation so powerful
in arms, so advanced in the arts, should perish as Rome perished; that a
civilisation so widely diffused should be buried as was the Roman civilisation,
is the greatest marvel which history presents. To the Roman citizen of the
time of Augustus or the Antonines, it would have appeared as incredible,
as utterly impossible that Rome could be overwhelmed by barbarians, as to
the American citizen of to-day it would appear impossible that the great
American Republic could be conquered by the Apaches, or the Chinooks, our
arts forgotten, and our civilisation lost.

How did this once
incredible thing happen? What were the hidden causes that sapped the strength
and ate out the heart of this world-conquering power, so that it crumbled
to pieces before the shock of barbarian hordes? A Roman historian himself
has told us. "Great estates ruined Italy!" In the land policy of Rome
may be traced the secret of her rise, the cause of her fall. "To every
citizen as much land as he himself may use; he is an enemy of the State
who desires any more," was the spirit of the land policy which enabled
Rome to assimilate so quickly the peoples that she conquered; that gave
her a body of citizens whose arms were a bulwark against every assault,
and who carried her standards in triumph in every direction. At first
a single acre constituted the patrimony of a Roman; afterwards the amount
was increased to three acres and a half. These were the heroic days of
the Republic, when every citizen seemed animated by a public spirit and
a public virtue which made the Roman name as famous as it made the Roman
arms invincible; when Cincinnatus left his two-acre farm to become Dictator,
and after the danger was over and the State was safe, returned to his plough;
when Regulus, at the head of a conquering army in Africa, asked to be relieved,
because his single slave had died, and there was no one to cultivate his
little farm for his family.

But, as wealth
poured in from foreign conquests, and the lust for riches grew, the old policy
was set aside. The Senate granted away the public domain in large tracts,
just as our Senate is doing now; and the fusion of the little farms into
large estates by purchase, by force and by fraud went on, until whole provinces
were owned by two or three proprietors, and chained slaves had taken the
place of the sturdy peasantry of Italy. The small farmers who had given
her strength to Rome were driven to the cities, to swell the ranks of the
proletarians, and become clients of the great families, or abroad to perish
in the wars. There came to be but two classes—the enormously rich and their
dependents and slaves; society thus constituted bred its destroying monsters;
the old virtues vanished, population declined, art sank, the old conquering
race actually died out, and Rome perished, as a modern historian puts it,
from the very failure of the crop of men.

Centuries ago this
happened, but the laws of the universe are to-day what they were then.

____________________

I have endeavoured in this paper to group
together some facts which show with what rapidity, and by what methods,
the monopolisation of our land is going on; to answer some arguments which
are advanced in its excuse; to state some principles which prove the matter
to be of the deepest interest to all of us, whether we live directly by
the soil or not; and to suggest some remedies. That land monopolisation when
it reaches the point to which it has been carried in England and Ireland
is productive of great evils we shall probably all agree. But popular opinion,
even in so far as any attention has been paid to the subject, seems to
regard the danger with us as remote. There are few who understand how rapidly
our land is becoming monopolised; there are fewer still who seem to appreciate
the evils which land monopolisation is already inflicting upon us, or the
nearness of the greater evils, which it threatens.

And so as to the
remedy. There are many who will concede that the reckless grants of public
land should cease, and even that the public domain should be reserved
for actual settlers, but who will be startled by the proposition to put
the bulk of taxation on land exclusively. But the matter will bear thinking
of. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this land question.
The longer it is considered, the broader does it seem to be and the deeper
does it seem to go. It imperatively demands far more attention than it has
received; it is worthy of all the attention that can be given to it.

To properly treat
so large a subject in so brief a space is a most difficult matter. I have
merely outlined it; but if I have done something towards calling attention
to the recklessness of our present land policy, and towards suggesting
earnest thought as to what that policy should be, I have accomplished all
I proposed.